WordPress has had its first real public drama the last few weeks, and there has been concern over the future of the project. As we host hundreds of WordPress sites in different configurations, this affects us and our clients tremendously.
If you’re not familiar with the goings on behind the scenes of the world’s biggest content management system, we’ll sum it up briefly:
Recently, Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, and co-founder of the WordPress publishing software, went on the attack against WP Engine, one of the largest and most established WordPress hosting companies in the industry. The details of the disagreement are complex, and not entirely relevant to this communication.
WordPress also took control of and renamed a very popular plugin that was maintained by WP Engine, “Advanced Custom Fields”. This plugin is used in many of our websites and extends the functionality of WordPress considerably.
This situation has caused uncertainty and confusion in the development community. Our main priority is the security and stability of the websites we maintain. Our sites depend heavily on all parties involved in this disagreement, so we hope for an amicable solution in the near future.
What this might mean for the websites we host and maintain in the short term is connecting the WordPress updates and plugins to the appropriate tool they were built with. Most of this is “behind the scenes” and will not affect our clients. However, there may be some situations where a small amount of billable time is necessary to keep a website secure and stable. We will communicate directly with those clients if and when necessary.
We thank all of our clients for their trust. Clients host their websites with us so that they don’t have to feel the stress of these situations, and that’s exactly our intention in communicating these important events.
Depending on how these disagreements are resolved, we may have updates in the future. Stay tuned. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to reach out to us with any questions you may have. We’re here to help!
Sincerely,
Jason Clark
Chief Marketing Officer
VIA Studio / eResources
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